So far the plan is to leave Toronto early on Friday, have lunch at Ann Arbor, MI, sleep over in Louisville, KY, and then move on to Memphis, TN, where my brother and his family will be spending the weekend. Monday, May 27th we leave Memphis to Vicksburg and spend the week there at my bother’s. We celebrate my birthday on Friday and come back to Toronto early in the morning of June 1st so we can get home by Sunday evening. I haven’t had much time to think about the trip yet as it took a while to confirm and I’ve been busy at work but planning gets into full swing this week. The main thing? Finding places to eat along the way!

I grew up secretly envying anyone who could create anything: friends who could draw, paint, play musical instruments; my mother and other relatives who could grab a bunch of ingredients and combine them to create delicious food; my cousin who could carve wood, my grandmother and aunt who could produce the most intricate crochet lace…. When I was about nine years old I learned to make crochet bracelets with my friend. I was very proud of that and now I wish someone had taught me to make more things out of crochet. For a while I could cross stitch.

Knitting seemed to me the hardest of all crafts. It puzzled me with all those needles waving in the air and somehow the act of pulling thread through the right loops produced intricate fabric. I was sure it probably required superhuman coordination and assumed anyone who knit must be super smart or talented. To be fair, I was not exposed to it much considering that I grew up in a tropical country where knitting sweaters and socks were seen most often in foreign movies on television.

In the summer of 2010 I finally took the plunge and took a couple of private classes at Lettuce Knit, a yarn shop in Kensington Market. I wish I remembered who taught me. At the end of the summer of 2010, when we drove to Prince Edward County, I started knitting my first scarf in a luxurious merino wool. Turns out it was not as impossible as I imagined and quite relaxing. Life took over, that Fall I began teaching at New College while also finishing my dissertation and the scarf lingered half unfinished in a bag.

I finally returned to it last summer. I finished the scarf (which I wore a LOT this past winter), took a couple more classes and began honing my skills. I attempted lace a bit too soon, and have knit a pair of fingerless gloves in a lovely tweed yarn, another scarf, two cowls that did not really work out because I did not keep the propery gauge, a lovely neckwarmer in alpaca for my mother, a shawl, a baby hat for my little granddaughter, and I’m now making a baby dress. I discovered a new community of knitters out there and have been learning all the lingo – Ravelry, LYS, frog, wip, DPNs, magic loop, the list goes on and on.

I can’t explain the feeling of watching a single thread being transformed into something both beautiful and practical by a combination of skill and two needles. Growing up, my solace was reading. It’s what I would do whenever I had a spare moment. I always had a book on me and I read walking down the street, waiting for the bus, waiting for appointments, in class when I was bored, everywhere. Once reading became part of my job as an academic, however, I started feeling the need to have breaks from reading. I needed something that would help me relax but also that it would get me off my head, something that I could do with my hands. Knitting has filled that hole.

Expect to see much more about yarns, patterns, fibers on this blog.

It’s stiff most of the time. Sometimes I pinch a nerve and my leg goes a bit numb. I have mostly learned to live with it but finally asked my doctor to recommend me a physiotherapist since I want to run but don’t want to make my hip worse. Perhaps the physiotherapist can recommend some exercises or at least tell me what I should not do.

Yesterday I went to the physiotherapist for the first time.

Twenty minutes. That’s how long it took her to straighten my hip. She made me lie down and pulled my leg. She kept pulling and loosening it. It did not hurt at all. After about twenty minutes she asked me to get up and we examined my hip again. It was straight. Both sides were the same. I still cannot believe it! She said it may shift again and if it does, I can go back. Meanwhile, I’m free to do whatever exercise I want.

Conscience cleared I started my running regimen today following the Running Room Learn to Run program. By the end of the summer I should be running 5km comfortably. I hadn’t realized how much it bothered me to have a wonky hip until the day it got magically fixed. I’ve been feeling euphoric all day!

This is going to be a good summer friends.

After four years commuting to university, I wanted to live at walking distance from campus. We focused our search on the Annex on the first day and got very dispirited the first day. Our criteria was simple: 2 bedrooms, walking distance to campus, pet friendly. All we saw the first day were dingy basements with 6 ft ceilings or attics that looked hastily partitioned for $1400. We paid $900 for a three-bedroom townhouse with a yard in Pointe-Claire, a leafy suburb a 15 min drive from downtown Montreal. We were shocked and wondering if we were ever going to find a decent place. We decided to look east of campus. We visited an apartment near Jarvis st that wasn’t so bad but a bit pricy (around $1500). As we drove back, we saw a nice brownstone building on Maitland St. I called the number on the sign but they didn’t have anything available. As we walked back to our car, we walked by a sign for the rental office of 17-story high rise. Alan was not interested in living in a high rise but I insisted we ask to see what they had. I didnt want to live in a highrise either but I was getting desperate. It turns out they had a two-bedroom apartment that had JUST been vacated. They hadn’t even cleaned it yet and the Helga, the rental agent, warned us that it would not “show well”. We worried when she said that because people had shown us some very disgusting places without any warning of the sort. She then lead us into the cleanest apartment I had seen. It had a wide, l-shaped living room /dining room with wall to wall windows. It was a corner apartment with large rooms, a small kitchen and bathroom, and big windows. The trees in front (we were on the second floor) made us feel like we were in a house. The rent was reasonable ($1,350 at the time), the building was super pet friendly, there was central air. How could it be so cheap? Turns out that being in the gay village kept rents a bit lower. We saw it as a bonus. We took it immediately and have lived here ever since. We moved out when we went to Spain for a year. A week before returning from Spain, I emailed Helga. Turns out she had another 2-bedroom corner unit in the same corner we had lived in. She would hold us for us to look at when we got back in town. We came back to the building.

Whenever anyone mentions SARS, that’s what I remember. Apartment-hunting in a city that has since become our home and that I have adopted as my own.

I’m excited about seeing my family but I won’t lie – I also can’t stop thinking of all the amazing southern food I’ll be eating! Po-boys, grits, fried green tomatoes, blackened anything, boiled peanuts… Yum!